Cost of Living
per year
per month
How Brea's prices compare to the US city average across major spending categories.
How far does your salary go in Brea?
Your $100,000 in Brea has the same purchasing power as $72,770 in the average US city. You'd need $27,230 more here to maintain that standard of living.
Demographics and workforce data from the US Census ACS 5-Year.
bachelor's or higher
Climate, safety, and walkability indicators.
See a side-by-side breakdown of cost of living, housing, and salaries.
Popular comparisons
Sorted by affordability — most affordable first.
Within 10 points of Brea's cost index of 137, sorted by closest match.
So why do people move to Brea? The honest answer involves a few specific things the data backs up — most clearly paychecks here run high and a well-educated peer group. The detail on each one is below.
Brea's typical household earns $120,226, which puts it in the top tier of US cities for household income. The bottom of the wage distribution isn't necessarily different from anywhere else, but the median and above sit meaningfully higher.
Brea has a college-educated share of about 48% among adults 25+, which is higher than the national norm. It shows up in the local job mix, in the school district's reputation, and in the kind of conversations you have at the coffee shop.
Reasons are pulled from Brea's actual data — Census ACS, BLS, BEA, NOAA, EPA AQS, FBI, and Walk Score. We don't list positives that aren't supported by the numbers, which is why different cities show different sections.
Not really a snow town. With winters averaging 37°F, Brea sits in the mild-cold band where snowflakes appear occasionally and everything melts within a day. Most years see one storm worth talking about.
Cool, not cold. Winters in Brea sit around 37°F — sweater-and-jacket weather most days, with the occasional cold front that reminds you it's still winter.
Properly hot. Brea's summer averages around 103°F with daily highs that routinely break 100°F. The trick to summer here is starting the day at sunrise and staying inside through the worst of it.
Approximately USDA Hardiness Zone 9. That's the band gardeners use to pick plants — anything rated for Zone 9 or colder should survive a typical winter in Brea. (The estimate is derived from our winter-temperature data; the official USDA map uses station-level annual minimums and may differ by half a zone.)
Roughly 584 feet (178 m). That's modest elevation — comparable to most inland-Midwest and Southern cities.
Middle of the pack. Brea comes in around 3,450 per 100,000, basically the national average. The interesting question is usually which neighborhood, not which city — that's where the real variation lives.
Significantly. Brea's index of 137 puts it in the top tier of US cities for cost of living — roughly 37% above the national baseline. The pattern is familiar: housing eats a large share of incomes, and people earning median-equivalent jobs from cheaper metros feel the difference fast.
Brea scores 32 out of 100 on Walk Score, which translates to "car-dependent but not aggressively so". Some neighborhoods buck the citywide average; the dense inner cores are usually noticeably more walkable than the city number suggests.
As a rule of thumb, plan on about $96,194 to live in Brea the way a $70,000 earner lives in a typical US city. The math gets less forgiving the lower you go below that. Median rent in Brea runs about $2,218/mo — keeping housing under 30% of gross income points to a similar floor on what you'd want to earn.